The Week In Links—February 14th

Trafficking survivor Jes Richardson offers a concise, helpful critique of most ‘rescue’ operations: “When someone is rescued the power, strength, courage, and control is placed in the hands of the rescuers, rather than empowering the person being rescued.”

This guy read Melissa Gira Grant’s new book and now he gets it: sex work is labor, period.

Also, Melissa’s first interview for that book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, came out in NY Magazine. But don’t worry, she promises her interview with us will be much juicier.

Police in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan reacted to a nationally televised exposé about local sex work with raids on February 9th against 2,000 entertainment venues and the arrests of more than 60 people…with the unintended consequence of opening up a nation wide debate about legalization of the industry.

Northern Ireland’s justice committee met a real, live sex worker and it looked and felt a bit like The Crucible.

There only seems to one growth industry in the communities surrounding Zimbabwe’s diamond mines: sex work. Unfortunately, even some children have entered this market, as a means to elevate their families out of poverty.

Somebody is killing sex workers in Kenya and they have very few people to turn to for help and protection. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened.

Police in Sonoma County are rethinking the way they handle sex crimes by—you guessed it—focusing on clients. A decoy named “Amber” was used instead of a the traditional model of a police officer posing as a john. Gee, the trial sting they ran seemed awfully similar to a legitimate prostitution ring. HMMM. The first commenter hits the nail on the head: “‘Amber’ was not a victim of human trafficking. ‘She’ was a male cop. I think police should focus on helping actual human trafficking victims rather than creating opportunities for men to commit the world’s oldest crime.”

A manhunt has been launched in London to find Robert Richard Fraser, connected to the murder of one local sex worker, Maria Duque-Tanjano, and the attack of another.

Hey, Upworthy, pick a side. First you feature videos by industry abolitionists about how all migrant sex workers are duped trafficking victims, and then you post this video by Red Light District Chicago on how, as we all know, sex workers are best positioned to stop trafficking? As the sex workers in this video state themselves: “Conflating consensual sex work and sex trafficking is a disservice to both sex trafficking victims and sex workers.”

One of the strippers who posed with Katy Perry in leaked TMZ pics last week was fired by Spearmint Rhino for breaking the club’s “no cameras” rule.

Yet another great interview with Tits and Sass contributor Mindy Chateauvert on her new book, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk, this time talking about the leather community, LGBT mainstream movement support or lack of it for sex workers, paternalist feminists, and the politics of public sex with Metroweekly.

Police in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan reacted to a nationally televised exposé about local sex work with raids on February 9th against 2,000 entertainment venues and the arrests of more than 60 people…with the unintended consequence of opening up a nation wide debate about legalization of the industry.

Sarah Walker of the English Collective of Prostitutes reports that “Ever since grants were done away with and loans introduced, we’ve been contacted by increasing numbers of students considering or involved in sex work.” The National Union of Students (NUS) recently launched a research project with Swansea University in order to get a better idea of the number of students funding their education with sex trade work in Britain. NUS vows that student unions will mobilize to provide support for student sex workers.

Speaking of students, we’re surprised, but for once we haven’t been inevitably betrayed by the Left—a motion to advocate for the decriminalization of sex work was passed by an overwhelming majority by the Edinburgh University Students’ Association.

ANMAR, an Argentinian sex workers’ rights organization, issued a press release denouncing the police and the local justice system for doing nothing to find sex worker Natalia Suarez when her disappearance was reported, in spite of witnesses to her abduction and concrete information regarding her last known whereabouts. Suarez was found six days later on a street corner, after having been tied up, beaten, and drugged by her captors.

An Abuja-based NGO, Society Against Prostitution and Child Labour in Nigeria (SAP-CLN), in collaboration with Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) have elected to embark on a controversial campaign to rid the Nigerian capital city of sex workers, yet all this article is concerned about is that they’ve arrested some “innocent women” along the way. How about shielding all women (and men, and people) from the violence of criminalization, rather than deciding that only supposedly virtuous non sex workers deserve protection under the law?

This Tuesday, the Erotic Service Providers Union and other Bay area sex workers protested an anti-trafficking panel also advocating the Swedish model, led by the city’s notorious “John School,” the First Offender Prostitution Program.